RAMALLAH, West Bank — As a teacher at a school in the Galilee in northern Israel, peace activist Shoshana Lavan says students often told her during the war, “Don’t talk to me about peace.”

But just hours after a ceasefire agreement was reached between Israel and Hamas, she was beaming with hope. “I feel like I can turn around and tell them, ‘I told you so,’” she said with a smile.

At that moment, she sat in the glistening white marble dining hall of al-Muqata’a, the presidential palace for the Palestinian Authority.

A self-described idealist who made aliyah six years ago from England in part to do anti-occupation work, Lavan and her husband, Baruch Velleman, joined about 50 other Jewish and Arab peace activists who took a bus from across the Green Line to meet with Palestinian Authority

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